Innovation is an important function of entrepreneurs. With hotel rooms in New York averaging $260 per night, pod hotels are opening. The rooms are small, 50 square feet, and inexpensive, $100 per night for a room with a bed and $125 per night for a room with a bed and a bunk. Pod hotels have been successful in Tokyo and cities in Europe. Will they make it in the United States? To learn more, read “Pod hotels in a bid to take New York by storm.”
John Brandon asks a couple of good questions in “Cities Increasingly Turn to 'Trash Police' to Enforce Recycling Laws.”
Beware the green police. They don't carry guns and there's no police academy to train them, but if you don't recycle your trash properly, they can walk up your driveway and give you a $100 ticket.
They know what's in your trash, they know what you eat, they know how often you bring your recycles to the curb -- and they may be coming to your town soon. That is, if they're not already there.
In a growing number of cities across the U.S., local governments are placing computer chips in recycling bins to collect data on refuse disposal, and then fining residents who don't participate in recycling efforts and forcing others into educational programs meant to instill respect for the environment.
From Charlotte, N.C., to Cleveland, Ohio, from Boise, Idaho, to Flint, Mich., the green police are spreading out. And that alarms some privacy advocates who are asking: Should local governments have the right to monitor how you divide your paper cups from your plastic forks? Is that really the role of government?
Rather than trying to police, fine and reeducate people into respecting the environment, local governments could hire people to sort trash. Specialization creates wealth. A sorting center would allow some workers to specialize in sorting trash, lowering the cost of sorting. With the time saved, household members would have more time to concentrate on their areas of expertise or better enjoy their leisure.
While his abundant practical talents brought him to Washington,…he was known for research that used new innovations — like the Internet — to answer old questions.
His most cited paper, which he wrote with Jeffrey Brown, looks at the value of the economic competition created by the Internet. Comparing groups with more and less Internet usage, the authors find that “a 10 percent increase in the share of individuals in a group using the Internet reduces average insurance prices for the group by as much as 5 percent.” On one level, the paper produced an interesting new fact about an emerging technology, but on a more basic level, it illustrates a timeless economic truth: competition is better for consumers than monopoly.
Professor Goolsbee’s work on direct-broadcast satellite television pushes further along this line. Using elegant econometrics, he concludes that “without DBS, entry cable prices would be about 15 percent higher and cable quality would fall.”
He also illustrated the power of competition in the airline industry, where he found that Southwest didn’t even need to fly somewhere to lower fares. Just the threat of the low-cost airline’s entry into a market spurred incumbent airlines to cut their prices…
Professor Goolsbee’s pregovernmental career was technically sophisticated but still grounded in the real world. His research shows a nuanced understanding of public policy that exaggerates neither the upside nor the downside of public action. He can apply the logic of economics in settings far from his core areas of scholarship – and on top of that, he is very, very funny.
Cuba on Monday said it is laying off nearly half a million workers, an eye-popping figure in any country, but especially in a nation where the government so totally dominates the economy.The government announced changes in property rights to help the newly unemployed.
The shift would mean that one-tenth of the island's 5.1 million-strong work force will be looking for jobs in the private sector by April 2011, a drastic change that could mean a radically altered economic outlook, especially for Cubans in their 20s and 30s who have known nothing but a paternalistic communist system ushered in by Fidel Castro in his 1959 revolution.
The changes are the most dramatic yet in a reform program that began when Raul Castro permanently took over the presidency from his brother in 2008 - but which have sputtered in fits and starts since then.
But they were not entirely surprising. Raul Castro has warned for years that the state could no longer afford to subsidize every part of Cuban life, nor pay workers who contribute little. In April, he floated the idea that up to 1 million workers were superfluous and must go.
To soften the blow, the statement - which appeared in state newspapers and was read on television and radio - said the government would increase private-sector job opportunities, including allowing more Cubans to become self-employed. They also will be able to form cooperatives run by employees rather than government administrators, and increasingly lease state land, businesses and infrastructure…Economic rights are civil rights. The U.S. should devise polity to support reform in Cuba. I believe that the reform should focus on increasing contact between average Americans and Cubans.
Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, said a series of small changes - such as privatizing some state-run barbershops, licensing more private taxis and distributing fallow land to private farmers - have moved Cuba toward economic reform. While none of those were blockbusters, Birns said, Monday's revelation has the potential to be one.
"Cuba is rapidly becoming like any other country," he said. "It is not going back. These are big changes."
Goolsbee has been an advocate of free trade. During 2008, he took some lumps when a Canadian government memo surfaced, citing Goolsbee saying that Obama statements on scaling back the North American Free Trade Agreement amounted to “political positioning.” Obama took a hit from then-opponent Hilary Clinton, but many economists were relieved.What a web of deceit. Here is my interpretation. The Canadian government was concerned about trade policy statements made by candidate Obama. Goolsbee, Obama’s economic adviser informs Canadian officials that Obama’s rhetoric is “political positioning,” or lying to the American electorate for political gain. That’s nothing new, but it is wrong and it isn’t endearing and thus the hit from Hilary. Many economists were relieved that Obama was lying to the electorate rather than adopting protectionist policy. That paints economists as elitist who prefer good policy to an honest description of their candidate’s true beliefs.
The pilot projects, which are set to begin in 2011, allow for a second child per family if at least one spouse is an only child. USA Today reports that Beijing, Shanghai and four other provinces will follow suit in 2012, with nationwide adoption of the new policy expected by 2013 or 2014. In 1979, China's one-child policy was introduced after decades of huge population boom followed by mass death due to resulting food shortages. The policy, which has prevented 400 million births, restricted the country's ethnic Han majority to have only one child per family (exempting most ethnic minorities) and has remained nearly the same since, though a few exceptions have been made. (Some rural farm families have been allowed to have a second child if the first is a girl.)
A wide gender imbalance, as well as the need for more children to care for parents, has likely influenced the government's tight control on the country's birthrate. (Even though prenatal sex screening was banned in 1994, female infanticide is still in practice because of the cultural preference for boys.) A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2009 found that China has some 32 million more boys than girls under the age of 20.I have two comments to add. An aging population might also be contributing to the policy change. Someone must pay for the social programs that support the elderly. Finally, the mass death due to food shortages was not caused by the increasing population nor was the mass starvation due to bad weather. It was due to bad policy pursued by China’s communist government.
“The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore,” he said.I’m not sure what constitutes “rejecting the ideas of the Revolution,” but rejecting state ownership seems important. Goldberg continues,
This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, "Never mind"?
I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, "He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under 'the Cuban model' the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country."
Julia pointed out that one effect of such a sentiment might be to create space for his brother, Raul, who is now president, to enact the necessary reforms in the face of what will surely be push-back from orthodox communists within the Party and the bureaucracy. Raul Castro is already loosening the state's hold on the economy. He recently announced, in fact, that small businesses can now operate and that foreign investors could now buy Cuban real estate. (The joke of this new announcement, of course, is that Americans are not allowed to invest in Cuba, not because of Cuban policy, but because of American policy. In other words, Cuba is beginning to adopt the sort of economic ideas that America has long-demanded it adopt, but Americans are not allowed to participate in this free-market experiment because of our government's hypocritical and stupidly self-defeating embargo policy. We'll regret this, of course, when Cubans partner with Europeans and Brazilians to buy up all the best hotels).The emphasis added to Goldberg’s point is mine, and I couldn’t agree more. It will be ironic if we don’t recognize that we’ve won. The Obama administration has taken small steps to normalized relations with Cuba and it should take more. Those steps should be overwhelmingly supported by both parties and the Cuban community in Florida. Is our government’s goal to punish the Cuban government or aid the Cubans by promoting a market system and democracy?
The 3% figure, which is computed from IRS data, is based on simply counting the number of returns with any pass-through business income. So, if somebody makes a little money selling products on eBay and reports that income on Schedule C of their tax return, they are counted as a small business. The fact that there are millions of people in the lower tax brackets with small amounts of business income may be interesting for some purposes, but it is irrelevant for the assessment of the economic impact of the tax hikes.
The numbers are clear. According to IRS data, fully 48% of the net income of sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S corporations reported on tax returns went to households with incomes above $200,000 in 2007. That's the number to look at, not the 3%. Would Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Biden deny that the more successful firms owned by individuals in the top income-tax bracket are disproportionately responsible for investment and job creation?It appears that 3% of households earn 48% of net income of small businesses. They also cite economic literature that finds that increasing taxes on small businesses would reduce gross receipts of small businesses subject to the tax by 7%, impede long-run economic growth, and discourage entrepreneurs for starting new businesses.
The nation demands the impossible: quick, painless solutions to long-term, structural problems. While they're running for office, politicians of both parties encourage this kind of magical thinking. When they get into office, they're forced to try to explain that things aren't quite so simple -- that restructuring our economy, renewing the nation's increasingly rickety infrastructure, reforming an unsustainable system of entitlements, redefining America's position in the world and all the other massive challenges that face the country are going to require years of effort. But the American people don't want to hear any of this. They want somebody to make it all better. Now.Another of my fears is that the electorate will become so deadlocked between competing ideologies that no decision will be made precipitating an irresolvable government debt crisis.Replace this text with...
The unemployment-insurance program involves a balance between compassion—providing for persons temporarily without work—and efficiency. The loss in efficiency results partly because the program subsidizes unemployment, causing insufficient job-search, job-acceptance and levels of employment. A further inefficiency concerns the distortions from the increases in taxes required to pay for the program.
| Peak Unemployment Rate | Nov-Dec 82 | Oct 09 |
| Unemployment Rate | 10.8% | 10.1% |
| Mean Duration (Weeks) | 17.6 | 27.2 |
| Long-term Share | 20.4% | 36.0% |
| Peak Mean Duration (Weeks) | Jul 83 | June 10 |
| Unemployment Rate | 9.4% | 9.5% |
| Mean Duration (Weeks) | 21.2 | 35.2 |
| Long-term Share | 24.5% | 46.2% |
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